Iceland has entered a new period of volcanic activity with recent eruptions destroying homes and forcing thousands to flee. Now, one mother and son architect team want to turn lava’s destructive force into a building material of the future.

Reykjavík

In Iceland, where recent volcanic eruptions have caused significant damage, architects Arnheildur Palmadóttir and her son Arnar Skarpjensson are pioneering the use of molten lava as a building material. Their project, Lavaforming, seeks to reimagine lava not as a threat but as a valuable resource for sustainable construction. The team is experimenting with various methods, including casting lava into blocks, using robots to shape structures, and leveraging lava's natural properties for insulation and strength. While lava has historically been used in construction in its solid form, utilizing it in its molten state is a novel approach. The architects believe this method could offer a low-carbon alternative to concrete and has potential applications worldwide, especially in regions facing extreme environmental challenges.

See how architects in Iceland want to build with molten lava

Iceland is built out of lava, and lava has flowed in Iceland for thousands of years. We think about it as a threat, but somehow we haven't thought about it as a resource. Lavaforming is about how we can use it as an opportunity. My name is Arnheildur Palmadóttir, and I'm an architect. My name is Arnar Skarpjensson. I'm one of the co-creators of Lavaforming. Yeah, Arnar is my son. We work with stories and forecasting what could happen in the future. The idea for Lavaforming started in 2018. People thought it was completely crazy, but then... After weeks of seismic rumblings, a volcano in Iceland erupts. The Arctic night illuminated as the Earth breaks apart. When we had had eruptions in Reykjanes, discussions became totally different, because people saw the abundance of materials. Lava is an extraordinary building material, because it actually has all the materialities that today's building materials have. So, we have been imagining different building methods, and how people in Iceland will experiment with lava throughout the next 150 years. One of the methods that we imagine is digging trenches in the landscape. Once the lava cools, then we have these standing walls. We have this kind of foundation for a whole city. One other more futuristic method are these robots that wander the lava fields. They eat the molten lava and almost vomit it out to create an additive structure, kind of like a 3D printer. What would be easiest to do today is to cast it into blocks and create familiar prefab units. Compared to concrete, their CO2 footprint is almost nothing. We have, of course, ancient use of lava, crushing it into concrete-like mixes like the Romans did. It's been used as bricks. We have it in Sicily. But using it in a molten state is something that we haven't seen before. As it stands today, we are in the middle of the first material tests. It can be used in many, many ways. If it cools slowly, you get rock-like structural elements. If it cools quickly, it becomes glass. And, of course, it has a lot of insulation effects. The result is this natural-looking cave-like structure. It's hard for us to draw from other architects because we are looking at geological processes and the fact that we can build so quickly entire cities out of this. We have, of course, other places in the world where this method could be used. But it's more this way of thinking about resources, thinking about our environment. How can we, for example, harness extreme heat, extreme wind, rising sea levels and melting glaciers? The idea is global because the problem is global.

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